Hard to believe, but there were Jews in Toronto and probably Montreal as well who were drawing monthly pensions from the U.S. government as late as 1925 for their participation as soldiers in the American Civil War. An index of Civil War pension recipients indicates that some 4,966 veterans of America’s most sanguinary conflict filed…
The following pages are from the souvenir booklet published by the Hebrew Sick Benefit Society of Toronto in 1935 upon the commemoration of its 35th anniversary. It contains many greetings, advertisements and other items from individual members, often listing family names and other details about family history. Most of the pages are in Yiddish. Each…
From Canadian Jewish News, 2003 He was a British soldier and she was a Jewish nurse in British-mandate Palestine: they met in Egypt about 1940. She was killed in an accident and he vowed to let her family know. But how to find them? He — the British soldier — knew that she had been…
From the Toronto Star Weekly, September 1913 ◊ Note: This article describes the very diligent efforts that went into producing Toronto’s city directories of a century ago. This is good news for genealogists because it assures us of the reliability of the directory information. However, individuals of Chinese, Macedonian and other “foreign” ancestry were not always…
My uncles, aunts and cousins on the Glicenstein [Gladstone] side always perk up when I mention the huge unclaimed fortune that is supposedly hidden somewhere in our extended family tree. Their eyes grow big when they hear that an alleged distant cousin of ours, a wealthy brewery owner, supposedly died intestate (without an heir) in…
The Rothschilds had one. The Disraelis had one. The Montefiore, Mocatta and Sassoon families each had one. And so, according to some interpretations, did each of the twelve tribes of Israel. Popular with the Jewish aristocracy in Europe since medieval times, Jewish coats of arms once seemed a sort of harmless conceit for the rich.…
Problem: you know your Jewish ancestors or relatives lived in Toronto in 1911 — you even know their street address — yet you can’t find them in the 1911 census. No matter how many times you search, they do not show up in Ancestry.com’s database of the 1911 census. Frequently the problem occurs because a family…
From the Toronto Star, September 24, 1902 A fashionable audience of guests gathered this afternoon in Holy Blossom Synagogue to witness the marriage of Mr. Joseph Oppenheimer of New Orleans to Miss Lottie Marks, daughter of Mrs. D. Marks of 526 Euclid Avenue. The bride entered leaning on the arm of her grandfather, Mr. N.…
The Canadian Jewish Immigrant Aid Society published the following list of names in the Canadian Jewish Review in 1922 under the heading, “List of Letters from Europe for Relatives in Canada.” See the list below for full details. Butshatsky – Frazek Boxer – Praber from Taravize, Kiever Chia Dviore Grinspoon from Veinberg, Benderske, Chersaner Kvitko,…
This list of names appears in the program of a Negev Dinner Tribute that took place at the Royal York Hotel, November 1956. The list may help genealogists determine the presence of an ancestor or relative in Toronto at that time. The list is five pages long; a thumbnail of each page appears below; please…
